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VICTORIA -- During a weekend speech to the New Democratic Party’s governing council, Opposition leader Adrian Dix offered his take on the errors that were made in the recent provincial election.

One: “As good a job as a party as we did in the legislature, in the election campaign we failed effectively to prosecute the case that this government was — as it is — incompetent and unworthy of a new term in office.”

He drew strong applause with that one, unlike other items on his list. New Democrats are increasingly comfortable with the notion that their main failing was not going negative against the Liberals.

Two: “The platform — because we didn’t communicate it in a direct enough way to the voters — didn’t resonate sufficiently. The very voters who would have benefited from the measures that we proposed often did not hear about those measures and that was a significant failure of the campaign.”

The party spent 18 months putting together a platform that was, in Dix’s estimation, the “most progressive” in the 27 years he has belonged to the NDP. The release was staggered over the first 10 days of the campaign, accompanied by a well-funded advertising blitz. So why did it fail to connect? Well ...

Three: “Because I think it is important that we take responsibility personally, I could have been better in the campaign. And that will stay with me for a long, long time.”

He also professed, elsewhere in the speech, to take “full responsibility” for the loss. But when it came to detailing where he, personally went wrong, he ducked, most notably on his flip-flop on the proposal to twin the Kinder Morgan pipeline.

Four: “On Kinder Morgan, that issue took away from the core focus we had engaged in for a couple of years, which is to speak to the need to create family-supporting, good paying jobs ... Because of the way we handled the issue, we didn’t actually have the debate that British Columbians needed to have about pipelines.”

The way “we” handled the issue? There was nothing collective about it. Dix himself reversed position, coming out against the project in mid-campaign. It was a solo act, done without consulting any of his MLAs, including energy critic John Horgan. (“It was the leader’s choice, the leader’s call,” Horgan said recently, adding that it would not be useful for him to say whether Dix told him about the switch beforehand.)

Nor was that the end of Dix’s evasions on the central gaffe of the campaign. Longtime New Democrat Harry Lali, defeated in the May 14 election for the first time in five bids for a seat in the legislature, has gone on record about the impact of the Kinder Morgan flip-flop on the party’s political fortunes.

“When the announcement about the Kinder Morgan pipeline was made, it basically decimated Interior and northern B.C. for us — rural B.C., basically,” he maintained. “The blue-collar worker virtually abandoned the NDP in this election, mostly by staying at home.”

But Dix, in his presentation to the provincial council, offered an alternative explanation for the loss of blue-collar support in Lali country. “When you lose 40,000 forestry jobs in 10 years under the Liberals, it actually helps the Liberals win elections because those people who have been the bulwark of NDP support, particularly in the Interior, are not there.”

So it was all the fault of the Liberals. In short, as mea culpas go, this one came up short on the “mea” side of the equation. Mistakes were made, but for the most part by a disembodied “us,” not by Adrian Dix. Witness his comments on his own future as leader ...

“The leadership doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to us. It’s us that gets to decide these questions at conventions and provincial councils ... We will make these decisions together leading up to the convention and at the convention in November with respect to leadership.”

And unless the rest of the collective “we” is prepared to give him a good, strong push, it is my guess that he’ll try to stay on as leader.

For now he intends to preside over the Opposition in the coming session of the legislature while ensuring that the party conducts a review into Campaign 2013: “Not just why we lost, but how we win.”

He’s been saying that since the day after the election. But as of Monday the party had yet to announce either the terms of reference for such a review or who would conduct it.

Indeed, at Saturday’s session of the provincial council, I gather they were still arguing over whether the overseers should number three, five or seven. Note, too, that according to the report on the meeting by Dene Moore of The Canadian Press, “it took members a half-hour just to agree to the agenda.”

It was ever thus in the fractious NDP, notwithstanding Dix’s insistence Saturday that “we are not the party of Hamlet,” meaning, presumably (for he did not explain the reference) that the party is inclined to favour action over agonizing.

New Democrats better hope that the current Dix-led production doesn’t play out in the same fashion as the Shakespearean tragedy. For I haven’t seen a performance yet that didn’t end in a stage littered with bodies.

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Vaughn Palmer: Adrian Dix’s mea culpa on provincial election loss short on the ‘me’ part

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